Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” So when do we step back and ask what is working and what is not – and also what freedoms are we giving up to gain this temporary security?

In his latest bestseller,Data and Goliath, world-renowned security expert and author Bruce Schneier goes deep into the world of surveillance, investigating how governments and corporations alike monitor nearly our every move. In this excerpt, Schneier explains how we are fed a false narrative of how our surveillance state is able to stop terrorist attacks before they happen. In fact, Schneier argues, the idea that our government is able to parse all the invasive and personal data they collect on us is laughable. The data-mining conducted every day only seems to take valuable resources and time away from the tactics that should be used to fight terrorism.

The NSA repeatedly uses a connect-the-dots metaphor to justify its surveillance activities. Again and again — after 9/11, after the Underwear Bomber, after the Boston Marathon bombings — government is criticized for not connecting the dots.

However, this is a terribly misleading metaphor. Connecting the dots in a coloring book is easy, because they’re all numbered and visible. In real life, the dots can only be recognized after the fact.

That doesn’t stop us from demanding to know why the authorities couldn’t connect the dots. The warning signs left by the Fort Hood shooter, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Isla Vista shooter look obvious in hindsight. Nassim Taleb, an expert on risk engineering, calls this tendency the “narrative fallacy.” Humans are natural storytellers, and the world of stories is much more tidy, predictable, and coherent than reality. Millions of people behave strangely enough to attract the FBI’s notice, and almost all of them are harmless. The TSA’s no-fly list has over 20,000 people on it. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, also known as the watch list, has 680,000, 40% of whom have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”

Data mining is offered as the technique that will enable us to connect those dots. But while corporations are successfully mining our personal data in order to target advertising, detect financial fraud, and perform other tasks, three critical issues make data mining an inappropriate tool for finding terrorists.

The first, and most important, issue is error rates. For advertising, data mining can be successful even with a large error rate, but finding terrorists requires a much higher degree of accuracy than data-mining systems can possibly provide.

Data mining works best when you’re searching for a well-defined profile, when there are a reasonable number of events per year, and when the cost of false alarms is low. Detecting credit card fraud is one of data mining’s security success stories: all credit card companies mine their transaction databases for spending patterns that indicate a stolen card. There are over a billion active credit cards in circulation in the United States, and nearly 8% of those are fraudulently used each year. Many credit card thefts share a pattern — purchases in locations not normally frequented by the cardholder, and purchases of travel, luxury goods, and easily fenced items — and in many cases data-mining systems can minimize the losses by preventing fraudulent transactions. The only cost of a false alarm is a phone call to the cardholder asking her to verify a couple of her purchases.

Similarly, the IRS uses data mining to identify tax evaders, the police use it to predict crime hot spots, and banks use it to predict loan defaults. These applications have had mixed success, based on the data and the application, but they’re all within the scope of what data mining can accomplish.

Terrorist plots are different, mostly because whereas fraud is common, terrorist attacks are very rare. This means that even highly accurate terrorism prediction systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.

The reason lies in the mathematics of detection. All detection systems have errors, and system designers can tune them to minimize either false positives or false negatives. In a terrorist-detection system, a false positive occurs when the system mistakenly identifies something harmless as a threat. A false negative occurs when the system misses an actual attack. Depending on how you “tune” your detection system, you can increase the number of false positives to assure you are less likely to miss an attack, or you can reduce the number of false positives at the expense of missing attacks.

Because terrorist attacks are so rare, false positives completely overwhelm the system, no matter how well you tune. And I mean completely: millions of people will be falsely accused for every real terrorist plot the system finds, if it ever finds any.

We might be able to deal with all of the innocents being flagged by the system if the cost of false positives were minor. Think about the full-body scanners at airports. Those alert all the time when scanning people. But a TSA officer can easily check for a false alarm with a simple pat-down. This doesn’t work for a more general data-based terrorism-detection system. Each alert requires a lengthy investigation to determine whether it’s real or not. That takes time and money, and prevents intelligence officers from doing other productive work. Or, more pithily, when you’re watching everything, you’re not seeing anything.

The US intelligence community also likens finding a terrorist plot to looking for a needle in a haystack. And, as former NSA director General Keith Alexander said, “you need the haystack to find the needle.” That statement perfectly illustrates the problem with mass surveillance and bulk collection. When you’re looking for the needle, the last thing you want to do is pile lots more hay on it. More specifically, there is no scientific rationale for believing that adding irrelevant data about innocent people makes it easier to find a terrorist attack, and lots of evidence that it does not. You might be adding slightly more signal, but you’re also adding much more noise. And despite the NSA’s “collect it all” mentality, its own documents bear this out. The military intelligence community even talks about the problem of “drinking from a fire hose”: having so much irrelevant data that it’s impossible to find the important bits.

We saw this problem with the NSA’s eavesdropping program: the false positives overwhelmed the system. In the years after 9/11, the NSA passed to the FBI thousands of tips per month; every one of them turned out to be a false alarm. The cost was enormous, and ended up frustrating the FBI agents who were obligated to investigate all the tips. We also saw this with the Suspicious Activity Reports —or SAR — database: tens of thousands of reports, and no actual results. And all the telephone metadata the NSA collected led to just one success: the conviction of a taxi driver who sent $8,500 to a Somali group that posed no direct threat to the US — and that was probably trumped up so the NSA would have better talking points in front of Congress.

The second problem with using data-mining techniques to try to uncover terrorist plots is that each attack is unique. Who would have guessed that two pressure-cooker bombs would be delivered to the Boston Marathon finish line in backpacks by a Boston college kid and his older brother? Each rare individual who carries out a terrorist attack will have a disproportionate impact on the criteria used to decide who’s a likely terrorist, leading to ineffective detection strategies.

The third problem is that the people the NSA is trying to find are wily, and they’re trying to avoid detection. In the world of personalized marketing, the typical surveillance subject isn’t trying to hide his activities. That is not true in a police or national security context. An adversarial relationship makes the problem much harder, and means that most commercial big data analysis tools just don’t work. A commercial tool can simply ignore people trying to hide and assume benign behavior on the part of everyone else. Government data-mining techniques can’t do that, because those are the very people they’re looking for.

Adversaries vary in the sophistication of their ability to avoid surveillance. Most criminals and terrorists — and political dissidents, sad to say — are pretty unsavvy and make lots of mistakes. But that’s no justification for data mining; targeted surveillance could potentially identify them just as well. The question is whether mass surveillance performs sufficiently better than targeted surveillance to justify its extremely high costs. Several analyses of all the NSA’s efforts indicate that it does not.

The three problems listed above cannot be fixed. Data mining is simply the wrong tool for this job, which means that all the mass surveillance required to feed it cannot be justified. When he was NSA director, General Keith Alexander argued that ubiquitous surveillance would have enabled the NSA to prevent 9/11. That seems unlikely. He wasn’t able to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, even though one of the bombers was on the terrorist watch list and both had sloppy social media trails — and this was after a dozen post-9/11 years of honing techniques. The NSA collected data on the Tsarnaevs before the bombing, but hadn’t realized that it was more important than the data they collected on millions of other people.

This point was made in the 9/11 Commission Report. That report described a failure to “connect the dots,” which proponents of mass surveillance claim requires collection of more data. But what the report actually said was that the intelligence community had all the information about the plot without mass surveillance, and that the failures were the result of inadequate analysis.

Mass surveillance didn’t catch underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in 2006, even though his father had repeatedly warned the U.S. government that he was dangerous. And the liquid bombers (they’re the reason governments prohibit passengers from bringing large bottles of liquids, creams, and gels on airplanes in their carry-on luggage) were captured in 2006 in their London apartment not due to mass surveillance but through traditional investigative police work. Whenever we learn about an NSA success, it invariably comes from targeted surveillance rather than from mass surveillance. One analysis showed that the FBI identifies potential terrorist plots from reports of suspicious activity, reports of plots, and investigations of other, unrelated, crimes.

This is a critical point. Ubiquitous surveillance and data mining are not suitable tools for finding dedicated criminals or terrorists. We taxpayers are wasting billions on mass-surveillance programs, and not getting the security we’ve been promised. More importantly, the money we’re wasting on these ineffective surveillance programs is not being spent on investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: tactics that have been proven to work. The NSA’s surveillance efforts have actually made us less secure.

Here is what Al gore, Obama, and Company are saying about anyone that doubts the theory of man-made Global Warming. Below is what Obama’s group Organizing for Action says.

Look, our crazy uncles aren’t the problem. But these members of Congress are using these far-fetched conspiracy theories as an excuse for not taking action on an issue that affects our environment, our economy, and yes, the planet our children and grandchildren inherit.

Climate change is real, and we’re not going to get anywhere on the issue until these guys admit that.

Did you catch that? Anyone who questions Global Warming is crazy. anything you hear to the contrary should be considered a “far-fetched conspiracy theory.” Furthermore, any inaction on your part to demand that lawmakers don’t create and push new legislation to curb global warming is a decision that damages your children’s well being. Yep, you heard it, if you don’t push Carbon Credits and cars that nobody can afford (or wants) then you are dooming your children to a barren wasteland!

For those of us who want more data that global warming is caused soley by humans the science continues to roll in. The DailyMail reports on how a growing body of scientist disagree with human global warming despite not being heard by the United Nations IPCC who is pushing for more laws to be passed.

Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases.

The research comes amid mounting evidence that the computer models on which the IPCC based the gloomy forecasts of a rapidly warming planet in its latest report, published in September, are diverging widely from reality.

Apparently even the ice is starting to reform.

In similar fashion, a number of cycles in the temperature of air and oceans, and the level of Arctic ice, take place across the Northern hemisphere over decades. Curry and Wyatt say there is evidence of this going back at least 300 years.

The world is truly nutty and one only has to look to the laws on the books to realize how backwards and unfree our laws actually make us. for the most part these laws are so weird, awkward, and backwards that nobody ever enforces them. however, what if they start enforcing them? In Pittsburgh some people are finding out just how wacky laws can be.

Eileen Freedman is finding out one crazy law that says “you have to park at least 30 feet away from the street.” To any sane person living today this seems like nonsense – if you are on your own driveway and not impeding pedestian or vehicle traffic then why should the city, state, or federal government care where you park? To make matters even more batshit crazy the city allows people to park on the road.

Yes, you heard corerctly – the city perfers you to park in the street where you have to walk in the street to get to your car, possibly block fire hydrants, impede traffic, and case blind spots to traffic on that road… instead of you parking in your own driveway where it safe to enter and you do not impede traffic in any way by being there.

My point in bringing this up is that the laws out there are so convoluted that nobody knows what the law says. It is fairly well known that much legislation is passed and The Hill has no idea what nitty-gritty details are in it. Look at Nancy Pelosi’s comments about passing a bill to see what is in it (whether you want to believe she was being condecending or just trying to push the Senate to pass their version of the bill). Look at how Obama signed the bailout bill just to find out that he granted bailout money to be directly allocated to the very CEOs that he despises and then turned around and somehow demanded that they give it all back even though it was law.

One of my favorite TV shows is House of Cards. A show about Washington D.C. and how it is all about politics-as-usual and quid-pro-quo. I’m not sure the slant of the director, but being one who is interested in politics I find the show to be absolutely fascinating – both on an entertainment level but also as an exploration of how I kind of perceive Washington D.C.

We have routinely heard our leaders discuss their signing of controversial legislation to be “OK” because “nobody will ever use it like that.” How about that domestic spying without a warrant? That domestic drone use? Or the assasination of American Citizens without trial “because they were a terrorist.”

Personally, I’d be absolutely embarassed to cite someone for parking in their own driveway – law on the books or not. But why now; why would a city suddenly start issuing fines to people parking in their driveways? The answer? Money. Cities are strapped and instead of curbing their spending and quit giving handouts to people they start looking for who they can milk for more money.

Oh yeah, didn’t Obama campaign on the promise that he wouldn’t raise his taxes on anyone making under $250k? Oh yeah, he just admited that “whoops, yeah we did raise taxes on some things.” Ha, gotcha! I expect all levels of government to start looking for more more money to steal tax in the near future.

For 126 years the United States of America had very limited taxes. In this time from 1787 until 1913 the government-funded itself by indirect taxes – mainly tariff, corporation, and other excise taxes. An indirect tax is one that is not levied on each person and can be avoided (or passed on) if you want to. An example of this is the tobacco tax – you do not have to pay the tobacco tax simply for being a resident. You only pay the tax if you voluntarily decide to participate in that activity that the tax is attached to – you can either not smoke or you can grow your own tobacco – you simply avoided that product or service to not pay an indirect tax.

Today most Americans have no idea about taxation. Even worse is that they have no idea what the difference is between direct and indirect taxation. Most Americans simply send off any paperwork they may have to a tax professional and that person does it. What is interesting is that you could send your paperwork off to five different individuals and you will come up with a different tax burden computation from each. Each tax preparer will interpret the code and take calculated risks off those interpretations. The sad part is that most of the time they are all right – the tax code is so insanely convoluted that there is an infinite amount of possibilities that one can arrive at for their tax burden – after all Title 26 was reported to be 73,954 pages (~4.5 million words) for 2013. Compare this with the 400 pages (240,045 words) the tax code was in 1913, the Bible with 1,291 pages (774,746 words), and War and Peace at 1,444 pages (866,562 words).

We are routinely told by our government that taxation is a voluntary system but yet every year the IRS sends out legions of enforcers and piles of fines to people they have somehow deemed to be delinquent. All this despite numerous politicians stating that it is voluntary; even IRS Commissioner Steve Miller said that it was voluntary. How is a system voluntary if we are threatened with fines, court proceedings, garnishment, repossession, liens, and jail time?

Something doesn’t smell right, does it?

But it doesn’t stop there. Recently we have learned that the Internal Revenue System has targeted political opposition to the President – and worse yet during and election year. This is an obvious abuse of power but despite this fact little to nothing has done to condemn or stop such acts. I think what bothers me about the entire connection with Obama is that a lot of people will claim that he had no knowledge of the targeting nor did he command the targeting. This may be true but I still think it begs a few pertinent questions.

The IRS Commissioner in charge during the targeting was Douglas Shulman. He was to serve for 5 years starting in 2008. So yes, Shulman was put into position during President W. Bush’s term. However, he served less than 9 months under Bush. Furthermore, the Senate that confirmed him was controlled by the Democrats and according to financial records Shulman donated to the Democrats. And this fact is evidenced even further by the White House visitor log showing that the IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 118 times between 2010 and 2011. By law the President can remove the IRS Commissioner if he has a cause and what a better cause than the IRS targeting certain political groups.

As the proverb goes “You may know a man by the company he keeps.” President Obama had every right to remove Shulman but didn’t. I personally I find it hard to believe that someone visited the White House 118 times in 2 years (that is about once a week) and never squeaked a word about any targeting of the hosts (President’s) opponents. C’mon.

Have you ever thought about how America was before the Tax Code? Arguably America had her biggest growth before 1913 when there were very few taxes and little to no taxes on any income. If you go over to my article entitled The Sixteenth Amendment Did Not Allow the Government to Tax You! then you will see that only 0.37% of the American population even filed for taxes. It wasn’t even until 1916 that over 1% filed and 1943 over 30% filed – mind you that the Sixteenth Amendment was implemented in 1913. Courts have repeatedly ruled that no new powers of taxation were created with the Sixteenth Amendment but that sure as hell doesn’t stop the politicians and the government from saying that is exactly what allows them to tax your paycheck.

The U.S. “tax army” is bigger than the U.S. army in Iraq.
Income taxes are so complex that there are up to 1.2 million paid tax preparers in the country — six times more than the number of troops in Iraq. The tax army includes legions of accountants, lawyers, and computer experts — some of the best minds in the country. Unfortunately, their brainpower is adding little to the nation’s standard of living.

A tax form for every special interest.
As the income tax grows more complex, the number of IRS tax forms has jumped from 402 in 1990 to 526 by 2002. Congress hands the accountants business on a silver platter when they create special interest tax forms such as “8845-Indian Employment Credit” and “8834-Qualified Electric Vehicle Credit.” When Congress penalizes an activity, we get tax forms such as “6197-Gas Guzzler Tax.” It’s time to end the micromanaging and adopt a simple flat-rate tax. Until then, Congress needs to supplement “6478-Credit for Alcohol Used as Fuel” with form “XXX-Credit for Alcohol Used for Drinking.”

Double-tax on dividends: 60 years and still not fixed.
Sixty years ago, a Treasury report noted that “double taxation of corporate profits is the principal problem raised in connection with the corporation income tax.” In the 1930s, a Treasury report argued that the tax disincentive to pay dividends caused corporate management problems. Recent scandals proved them right. Congress should bite the bullet and reform dividend taxes now — before the next round of corporate scandals begins.

Congress promotes discrimination through the tax code.
The front of the Supreme Court building boldly declares “equal justice under law,” yet the income tax has hundreds of discriminatory provisions. For example, homeowners are treated more favorably than renters since they can deduct mortgage interest and other itemized deductions. Consider that a higher-income homeowner can effectively deduct car loan interest by shifting around his finances but a lower-income apartment dweller cannot. Americans would not stand for such discrimination on other taxes — imagine if each shopper at Wal-Mart was assigned a different sales tax rate!

Congress on tax complexity: Who us?
Congress frequently holds hearings on tax simplification so members can denounce the tax code’s complexity. Each time, congressional experts and outside think tanks provide useful simplification ideas. Then when the TV cameras are turned off, Congress promptly ignores them and votes for more special interest breaks. The result: The number of pages in the tax code and regulations doubled from 26,300 in 1984 to 54,846 by 2003, according to tax publisher CCH.

AMT designed to catch 155 taxpayers will soon catch 37 million.
The alternative minimum tax is an unneeded parallel tax system alongside the ordinary income tax. It began life in 1969 after Congress was shocked (shocked!) to learn that 155 wealthy individuals were not paying tax because they used too many of the deductions that Congress had provided them. The AMT has been a complex nuisance ever since. But this dumb idea aimed at the rich is set to explode on the middle-class as the number of AMT taxpayers skyrockets from 3 million today to 36 million by 2010.

Voluntarism works for the U.S. military, not the income tax.
For years, officials have hailed the income tax as a voluntary system. The Treasury calls it “our voluntary tax system.” The IRS says that it pursues “enforcement programs to promote voluntary compliance” and establishes “strategies to maximize voluntary tax law compliance by emphasizing customer satisfaction.” But with 32 million IRS penalties assessed each year and about $10,000 in income taxes imposed on each taxpaying household, the tax isn’t voluntary and these customers aren’t satisfied.

Congress can’t figure out how to measure “income.”
Although the income tax is 90 years old, Congress still can’t figure out how to measure “income.” Some income such as municipal bond interest is not taxed, but other income such as dividends is taxed twice. The income tax treatment of savings is particularly incoherent and unstable. For example, there have been 25 major changes in the capital gains tax since 1922. The solution is to replace the income tax with a low-rate tax that exempts savings.

Family saving shouldn’t require an advanced math degree.
Shouldn’t saving for education, retirement, and other items be as simple as putting money in the bank? Instead, Congress has manufactured hundreds of special savings rules, such as for 401(k)s, Keoghs, deductible IRAs, nondeductible IRAs, education IRAs, Roth IRAs, traditional pension plans, annuities, SIMPLEs, SEPs, MSAs, and others. The IRS guide to IRAs alone is 105 pages long! President Bush’s initiative to consolidate the savings plans and create a universal IRA would be a good step to bring some sanity to this mess.

Income taxes: A bad idea that got worse.The income tax is not an example of a good idea gone bad. It was bad from the beginning, and it just keeps getting worse. The income tax distorts financial planning and business investment, and it encourages tax avoidance and evasion. Because the income tax is built on an unworkable base of “income,” the law is continually changing. Let’s simplify Americans’ finances and disband the tax army by pursuing fundamental tax reform.

Why would one want to contend with the IRS or the Tax Law when even the IRS doesn’t know what it says (or apparently what it does)? Here is another list of 10 reasons why the IRS is no good from FreedomWorks.

1. The Code is Too Complex.

The code is so big that politicians can’t even agree on how long it is. Title 26, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code totals to about 3,400,000 million words. The non-partisan Tax Foundation reports that the entire tax code with regulations in 2005 was over 9,097,000 words. To put that in perspective, the Bible has 774,746 words. The code has grown in length between 1995 and 2005 by 18.9 percent. The directions for filing a typical form 1040 totals 161 pages. The “EZ” version is 41 pages.

2. The Code is Beyond Comprehension.

No single person knows or understands the entire tax code– not even IRS Employees!

In 2008, the IRS was wrong on questions concerning tax law about 10 percent of the time. Myriads of accountants and lawyers are employed to decipher the cryptic tax code. It should be scrapped and simplified. No small modification to the code can remove the enormous complication.

3. The IRS is Too Big.

The IRS employed 90,647 people in 2008. It had operating costs of $11,207,223,000. If we simplified the code, then many of those IRS employees could go into more productive lines of work, rather than checking up on whether or not the correct amount of money was extracted from hard working Americans. The money spent on the IRS is economic deadweight loss caused by the level of complication of the code. If it were scrapped and replaced, billions of taxpayer dollars could be saved just by reducing the size of the IRS–not to mention all the gains from productively employing former IRS staff members in the private sector.

4. The Code Corrupts the Culture in Washington. DC.

Lobbying is the biggest business in Washington. About $3.2 billion was spent in the 2008 on lobbying. Many, if not the majority, of America’s 15,139 registered lobbyists are working on increasing the level of complication of the tax code by fighting for special loopholes and regulations that will save their company money or put their competitors out of business. Yet lobbying and ethics reform too often focuses on the symptoms, like gift bans, instead of the underlying cause. What would be America’s single most effective move to clean up the swamp of special interests in Washington? Scrapping the code and replacing it with a fair and simple one.

5. The Code Taxes Some Income Two or More Times.

Our code taxes certain types of income twice. For instance, a company pays taxes on dividends that it pays out and then when stock holders earn money from the dividends, they pay taxes on them again. When government taxes particular types of income more than others, it distorts the market economy by punishing certain kinds of behavior with double taxation. Absent government intervening through the tax code with the complicated and unfair system, the market economy would likely perform more efficiently.

6. Congress Uses the Tax Code to Legislate Morality.

Congress, with its recent passage of the SCHIP bill, raised taxes on cigarettes by 61 cents per pack. Our corrupt and easily manipulated tax system allows members of Congress to pass laws that increase the cost of certain behavior. In the case of SCHIP, they targeted smoking. In the case of AIG, they targeted bonuses. Frightening precedents are being set by Congress this session that will likely lead to even more explicit penalties for certain industries. President Obama claims that he will place a cap-and-trade tax on industry that will eliminate construction of any new coal power plants. Under a fairer and less easily manipulated tax system, government couldn’t pick winning and losing industries as we have witnessed recently.

7. High Marginal Tax Rates Penalize Success.

Marginal income taxes are higher for each dollar workers earn. Our most productive members of society face federal taxes of 36 percent or higher. Under our system, the top 10 percent income earners pay 70 percent of federal income taxes. The president plans to increase top marginal rates to at least 39 percent–and that’s not even counting state income tax rates. In virtually every state in the country, high income workers would face top marginal tax rates that would rob them of more than 50 percent of their income. Our current code destroys the incentive of the most productive to work hard.

Shouldn’t we be trying to give incentive to the most productive to continue working rather than taxing so much of their income away that they no longer think it’s worth working hard? How many inventions or cures for diseases have we lost because the most productive stopped working when faced with 50 percent or higher rates on each additional hour of work?

8. Complying with the Code Costs Americans Billions.

Compliance is a multi-billion dollar industry and 59 percent of all individuals filing taxes hire someone else to do it for them totaling to 81 million returns done by accountants last year. If we scrapped the tax code for a simpler one, people could fill out their tax forms easily. The sum total benefit could be billions of dollars. All those accountants and lawyers who make their living off the level of complication of the tax code could go into more productive work that would benefit all Americans.

If we scrapped the code, the committee members would lose their power to manipulate the code in order to pay off their campaign contributors. Our tax system leads to corruption and corporate capture of legislation .

10. Laws Should Rest on Principles of Justice.

The tax code is modified every few years along no reasonable principle. The code is arbitrary and unpredictable, and is morphing from its stated purpose– efficiently raising government revenue– into an instrument that Congress uses to instill fear, punishment, and political control. The code should be scrapped and replaced with a more just system based on principles of fairness and equality before the law rather than on the whim of lobbyists and lawmakers.

America grew best when she didn’t demand through a “voluntary” tax system. People were allowed to manage their finances and plan for their savings. With an ever-changing tax system in place that grows by hundreds of pages per year and is over 73,000 pages what it was originally supposed to be it makes it very difficult to plan anything – especially for businesses. It should be fairly evident by now that the taxes collected aren’t for your benefit – it is for the lobbyist and the political leaders to get ahead of their competition. If you can have the government make your competition squirm while you don’t then you gain an advantage. GE did this in 2010 when it filed a 57,000 page tax return on its $14 billion of profits and paid… no taxes at all.

We should seriously look at shutting down the IRS. While everyone thought he was crazy Ron Paul repeatedly called to end the corrupt IRS.

I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax. That means that about 55 percent — over half of all revenue — comes from other sources, like excise taxes, fees, and corporate taxes.

We could eliminate the income tax, replace it with nothing, and still fund the same level of big government we had in the late 1990s. We don’t need to “replace” the income tax at all. I see a consumption tax as being a little better than the personal income tax, and I would vote for the Fair-Tax if it came up in the House of Representatives, but it is not my goal. We can do better.

As much as I hate to say it, the Second Plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto was “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” Why do we have such a tax system where we effectively punish those making money? Not to mention a system where people who pay no taxes repeatedly receive money and benefits for free.

I guess I could add in the attack on gun owners with no real charges, the attack on people not wanting to vaccinate, the people who want to grow their own food, etc. All I’m saying here is that more often than not it seems that our government (and this isn’t just Obama!) is against Conservative and Constitutional values. This doesn’t seem like a country where you can practices as you see fit with your own life anymore. Instead it is a country where you can only believe what is politically correct, speak truth that isn’t too harsh, and you must feel guilty of who you are. For if you speak or do what you want in life, you’re probably a racist, a bigot, you hate children, you hate Obama because he’s black, you love money more than old people, you’re white and don’t understand other races, you hate Mexicans because you don’t want them to come here illegally, and more.

I’ll say it and I know this turns people off but it really reminds me of how Germany was in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Atrocious things happened in Germany during those times things that most people would never agree to. But they kept quiet and hoped that things would turn around. They looked to the government with the master promise and master plan to make their country and world great again. They gave up their liberties. They gave up their firearms. They largely gave up their religions and political beliefs. The gave up their neighbors, friends, and family… for safety and a promise of prosperity. But most of all, they gave up their dignity.

When will Americans stand up and say “no more” attacking my neighbor simply because they are different? When will we realize that America is a melting pot of all different ideas, political beliefs, and religions and that we will never be an all cohesive group? That no matter what laws are passed we all have a right to live life as we see fit? Until we speak out, regardless of what politician is saying what… and say that these things are wrong… I fear we are doomed. We must stand up for our neighbor even if we disagree with them. They have a right to be who they are without our interference and vice-versa.

The idea that everyone is inocent until proven guilty – also referred to as Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat – has been a staple of civilized law for centuries. I grew up with this idea that if accused of anything that I would have the chance of rebuttal. I grew up with the notion that in America I couldn’t be taken away, thrown in a cell, and held indefinitely unless someone had proven that I had done something worthy of such treatment.

Things have apparently changed in today’s world in this regard. Today as Americans we are filled with fear of the unknown. We seem far removed from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words which were later echoed by John F. Kennedy where they said, the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Today we fear something on every corner – we fear that a terrorist is standing in line with us to blow up a plane, we fear that we will die of some new super-flu, we fear that Iran will bomb us tomorrow, and we fear that our neighbor will use their AR-15 to shoot down our children. Many of these things are largely unfounded – very few planes have been hijacked and used as weapons in the history of humanity, very few people die from some contagious virus, nobody has indefinitely proven that Iran is building a bomb, and you’re more likely to die from a kitchen knife or a hammer than an AR-15.

But it is fear that motivates us to do things or to give up things we normally wouldn’t do with logic and reason. Fear is irrational and our government knows this – Rahm Emanuel infamously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” In other words, when people are confused and cowering in fear, the impossible then becomes possible.

I am specifically speaking today about the idea of what we allow when we fear uncertainty. Nobody wants to be killed by a terrorist so to combat this fear we allow our government to handle the issue. However, when we allow the government to handle the issue we allow them to impede on us and our freedoms. In recent history our American government has passed legislation, implemented agency policy changes, or signed Executive Orders to seek out Americans they deem unsavory and assasinate them… without trial… or without any definitive proof that they have actually done anything other than talk bad about America or hang out with bad people who don’t like America.

When will Americans find such an action intolerable? For now the policy is distant – we are killing American citizens in other countries. Our news barely reports on it and when they do they are sure to invoke two American fears – that they are an Islamic and that they are a terrorist. In doing so, we disregard teh fact that the person was just as we are – an American citizen who is supposedly protected under law practice such as due process, burden of proof, and starting an investigation with a valid probable cause. This is what we citizens here are afforded here in Arizona, Ohio, and the rest of the United States so why isn’t this courtesy also afforded to citizens overseas?

I believe this is a very slippery slope and especially true when you consider how many times the government has accidentially killed the wrong person (for example, there was no wrongdoing found at Ruby Ridge but that didn’t stop them from shooting half a family). I am sure that Americans won’t care about this policy until they are the ones being detained or killed. Sounds like something Martin-Niemöller wrote about with Nazi Germany.

Of the scores of people dubbed terrorists and taken out by American military drone strikes, three men — all killed in the fall of 2011 — were U.S. citizens.

And their lives illustrate the complexity of the issue, recently brought to light amid a newly discovered government memo that provides the legal reasoning behind drone strikes on Americans.

Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were killed by a missile strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011, while al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, was killed in the country just weeks later.

Since the attacks, family members have called the deaths unjust and sued the U.S. government, calling the killings unconstitutional.

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, became well known for his fiery anti-American sermons posted throughout the Internet.

Samir Khan, who’d lived in both New York and Charlotte, N.C., produced a magazine called “Inspire” that became known for its extreme jihadist views.

But the most controversial drone strike took place on Oct. 14, 2011, when 16-year-old Abdulrahman was killed by U.S. forces.

Family of the Denver-born teenager say he had no ties to terrorist organizations and was unjustly targeted because of his father.

Nassar al-Awlaki, grandfather of Abdulrahman and father to Anwar, said he tried to protect his grandson as Anwar al-Awlaki’s profile grew.

In December, Nassar al-Awlaki told CNN, “In Anwar it was expected because he was under targeted killing, but how in the world they will go and kill Abdulrahman. Small boy, U.S. citizen from Denver, Colorado.”

Nassar al-Awlaki said his grandson snuck out of their Yemen home one night, leaving a note for his mother saying he would return in a few days. The boy never returned, killed instead while eating at an outdoor restaurant.

“Since the issue regarding Anwar came, I tried to insulate the family of Anwar from everything, regarding this matter,” Nassar al-Awlaki told CNN. “I took care of him, and suddenly after 2 year absence from his father, he decided to go to our government in Yemen to seek information from his father. That was the only reason he went, and he did not tell us.”

The Obama administration has remained mostly mum regarding Abdulrahman’s death, and at times has struggled to explain it.

“I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children,” former White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said to a gaggle of reporters in October. “I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

During his presidential campaign, Republican Rep. Ron Paul criticized the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, saying: “Al-Awlaki was born here, he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. … But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it’s sad.”

Anwar al-Awlaki’s ties to the United States go back to his father Nassar, who came to the country to earn a master’s degree. His son was born in New Mexico, and though the family returned to Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki came back to the U.S. for college, eventually becoming an iman.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, he became a popular spokesman for moderate Islam, and was often used to juxtapose perceptions that Islam is a religion that spreads hate. But less than a decade later, he was hiding in Yemen as a name on the CIA’s kill list.

“I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other Muslim,” he said in an audio message in March 2010.

Conversely, Khan was never interested in the peaceful side of Islam. The New York Times reports that as a teen, Khan’s attraction grew exponentially to militant sites on the Internet after 9/11. Parental concerns and intervention from community leaders proved unsuccessful. Khan was 25 when he died in Yemen.

In July 2012, Samir Khan’s mother, Sarah, joined Nassar al-Awlaki in a lawsuit against four senior national security officials.

“I don’t really necessarily agree with some of the things Anwar said against the United States, but does that mean they should kill him outside the law?” asked Nassar al-Awlaki.

I like Arizona. I have never felt unsafe here. Admittedly this is probably largely due to the fact that I live in suburbia-Chandler where there is barely a bar around. Nevertheless, I feel that Arizona does a lot right and that I feel safe.

However, according to a report written by the University of Maryland for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) in January 2012 Maricopa County is a hot spot for terrorism (p 2).

Terrorism? I honestly have no idea what they are talking about but apparently we have had 7 “single issue” terrorist attacks from 1970-2008 (p 18) with 6 of them being in the 2000’s (p 23).

What is more troubling is their definitions of who is considered “extreme right-wing.” They describe someone as extreme right-wing as a,

“group that believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent (for some threat is from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group), and believe in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism. Groups may also be fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation), anti-global, suspicious of centralized federal authority, reverent of individual liberty,and believe in conspiracy theories that involve great threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.” (p 8-9)

Now mind you, the START report is the report that was written for the Department of Homeland Security to combat terrorism. So I must ask, why is one that trains with firearms or survialism considered terrorism? Or why is it considered terrorism if one believes that sovereignty is a good thing?

I’m already shooting myself here in the foot in regards to this START report, but this just goes hand-in-hand with the 2009 Department of Homeland Security report entitled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment (here). In this specific document the DHS also calls out people concerned about “martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps” (p 4). So now we have two separate government documents that are labeling anyone that is concerned about the role of government… to be terrorist. The 2009 report also specifically calls out anyone that has purchased ammunition in bulk or that is a returning veteran.

Pair all these reports with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allows indefinite detention of American citizens without charge or trial and you have the making of a police state that even North Korea would be proud of. The only difference is that in America people still think they are free and will call you out as a kook (or now a terrorist) if you try to say otherwise.

Quotes:

"We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it." - Patrick Henry

"Politicians and diapers both need to be changed, and for the same reason." - Anonymous

"Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it." - William Penn

"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country" - Hermann Goering

"I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do this I keep on doing." - Romans 7:18-19

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain